Comics Time: The Other Side

Originally written on November 22, 2006 for publication by The Comics Journal. I went in for vitriol back then.

Agent Orange and The Other Side might seem different on the surface, in that the former is a chemical defoliant used during the Vietnam War and the latter is a comic book about the Vietnam War. But look a little deeper and you’ll find that they have two important characteristics in common: They both led to the destruction of trees, and they are both fucking awful.

No shopworn Vietnam shibboleth goes un-beaten-into-the-ground by writer Jason Aaron, who uses an apparent real-life friendship with author Gustav Halford, whose book The Short Timers was adapted into Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, as an excuse to pilfer every last sample-ready soundbyte from that film, strip it of context, and fire it like a Deer Hunter Russian-roulette bullet directly at the reader’s brain, with predictably hideous results. Nearly every line of dialogue seems to consist solely clichés strung together like a necklace of human ears: “IF YOU ARE NOT SQUARED AWAY AND BORN-AGAIN-HARD…THE GOOK WILL FUCK YOU UP BEYOND ALL RECOGNITION!” Complementing this one-dimensional portrayal of the American fighting man as an obscenity-spewing kill-crazy redneck motivated alternately by bloodthirsty chauvinism, pants-shitting terror and batshit insanity is the depiction of the Vietnamese everysoldier as a pristine holy warrior who talks like a cross between Mao and the Mandarin. The series’ parallel structure only highlights the unintentional hilarity of the characterizations. I couldn’t possibly illustrate this more clearly than by simply transcribing issue two, page one—which is split into two panels depicting the two main characters and their fellow soldiers—in its entirety:

[LEFT]

NARRATOR: The Twelfth Lunar Month in the Year of the Sheep. Vietnam. Somewhere between the coastal city of Vinh and the Laotian border. Deep within the holy sanctuary of the rain forest, we begin our historic journey with a cheer.

LEAD SOLDIER: For the liberation of our compatriots, the defense of our families, the defeat of our oppressors and the reunification of our fatherland…

ALL: Let’s march south!

[RIGHT]

NARRATOR: December 1967. Vietnam. Quan Nam province. Chest deep in the stinking mud of Danang, I begin my tour of duty digging holes for men to die in.

SOLDIER 1: Welcome to the exotic Indochinese Peninsula, new guy. Where heroes die young, and assholes live forever.

SOLDIER 2: Where dinks don’t die, they just go to hell and regroup.

SOLDIER 3: You think it sucks now? Just wait ’til you’re wasted.

SOLDIER 4: Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.

Can you guess which side is which? Holy Christ, it makes that scene from Platoon where the guy shows Charlie Sheen the picture of his sweetheart back home look inspired. Even poor Cameron Stewart gets fragged: His poppy, buoyant art has been a treat in semi-revisionist superbooks like Catwoman, SeaGuy and The Manhattan Guardian, but here his figurework goes from solid to stolid to squalid, losing all sense of movement and stripping the battle scenes (massacres all, naturally) of any power to grip, excite or terrify, not that they’d have much of a shot at doing so as written anyway. What was that quote from Full Metal Jacket again? Oh yeah: “I am in a world of shit.”

Everything I Do

Hi! My name is Sean T. Collins and I am a writer. Here are links to basically every place on the internet where you can find what I do. A site for everything and everything on its site, that’s my motto. Non-tumblrs up top, tumblrs down below.

All Leather Must Be Boiled: News and views on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, located at boiledleather.com. Home of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, co-hosted by Stefan Sasse. Of all my tumblrs this is where you’ll find the widest range of posts, as I often rope in pretty much anything I’m thinking and writing about television, fiction, fantasy, genre storytelling, politics, whatever. Beneath the gold, the bitter steel.

The True Black: Comics written by me and drawn by a host of talented collaborators. Also contains news of upcoming comics projects.

Bowie Loves Beyoncé: You can’t say no to the beauty and the beast, darling. Images of two of the best human beings and popular musicians, David Bowie and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. This was my first tumblr, so it’s what shows up when I like your posts.

Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts: No man with a good t-shirt needs to be justified. Good pictures of our greatest garment.

Superheroes Lose: Superhero publishers love putting pictures of their superheroes losing on the covers of their comics. I love putting them on this tumblr. When we imagine people who can do anything, this is what we imagine.

Badge: Stories of police brutality, overkill, and overreach in the United States of America, reblogged from around the internet with minimal comment. Before they bring the curtain down.

The Deep Ones: There’s something in the water. Sea monsters real, extinct, and imaginary. Co-founded and co-curated by me and Julia Gfrörer.

The Devil in Love: A man of wealth and taste. Images of the infernal with undeniable aesthetic and/or erotic appeal. Founded by Julia, co-curated by me.

Homage to Catalonia: Images of churches on fire or in ruins as a means by which to contemplate the positive and negative energy generated by the buildings and realized in the flames. Founded by me, co-curated by Julia.

Comics Democracy: Comics with over 10,000 notes on tumblr, found while tumbling and reblogged without comment. I will show you a world without gatekeepers.

Cool Practice: What I wanted to be and how I wanted to be it, one song at a time. Thoughts on music and its intersection with “coolness.”

Sean T. Collins on Comics: A repository for writing about comics (mostly comics on the web, mostly alternative-genre comics at that) for my former day job, this tumblr will also sometimes reblog writing-about-comics I’ve done elsewhere.

Sean T. Collins on Culture: The twin of seantcomics, this tumblr houses my old dayjob writing on genre culture that influenced me as a kid. Who knows what I’ll get up to with it eventually?

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour: A dedicated tumblr for my ASoIaF/GoT podcast, created for iTunes syndication purposes, but hey, you can follow it if you want.

In addition, I created several one-off tumblrs to host individual webcomics written by me and drawn by other people. I plan to reblog all of them to The True Black eventually, but here they are in their native habitats: